SKNHEAD by Shyanne Duquette, Found Festival 2026, Common Ground Art. Photo by Sable Boltz
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
“What would we do to be part of a community” What would we sacrifice?”
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Shyanne Duquette wants to know. With their new play SKNHEAD, opening Thursday at Common Ground’s Found Festival in a “secret location” on 97th Street, the mixed-Cree theatre artist takes us into the harsh, lonely world of inner-city 14-year old mixed-race latch-key kids. “They just want to belong to something, but they don’t know what that something is….”
And when, like these kids, you’re on the outside looking in, “yearning for something, but you don’t what you’re yearning for,” as Duquette puts it, the dangerous attractions of gang culture can’t be under-estimated. “These are kids who don’t exactly have a watchful parental eye over them.”
“Feeling like an outsider and not knowing how to break in” is something Duquette knows about first-hand. “The place of just being sad and alone…. There are layers of personal experience that I bring, embedded in the text,” says the 27-year-old multi-disciplinary playwright/ director/ actor/ producer/ arts facilitator.
playwright Shyanne Duquette
Duquette, who’s engaging and eloquent in conversation, has tapped their own experience before, the struggle to find roots, and re-claim Indigenous identity and culture. In their first play Omisimawiw (Cree for “elder sister”), which got its start at the 2022 Nextfest, they told the amazing true story of feeling an instinctive connection with another woman on the university-bound LRT. Duquette, who’d grown up with their mom and two sisters, went right up to the stranger with a question: “hey, is your dad my dad?” The answer, it turned out, was yes; they’d discovered a sister. And they’ve since become friends, added another younger sister to make a trio, and discovered other siblings from an Indigenous dad they didn’t know (“15 … that I’m aware of”).
SKNHEAD by Shyanne Duquette, Found Festival 2026. Rehearsal photo by Sable Boltz.
The six characters of SKNHEAD are “kids on the brink of something,” says Duquette. “In that desperate middle-school time, at 14 you don’t really know who you’re going to be. who you’ll be.” It’s one of the goals of SKNHEAD, says the playwright, to “scrutinize the predatory nature of gangs, their impact on low-income individuals. The impact of poverty can make a child years older than what are.”
And that applies to their own experience, and the complicated family dynamics that go with it. “The experiences I had at 12 are not the experiences of other theatre creators,” they say. And their challenge as an artist is “to balance what traditional theatre audiences expect from life, adulthood, childhood, with my own experiences and the story I want to tell, and the audience I want to reach.”
“I don’t come from a family of folks that go to the theatre,” says Duquette, a U of A grad with a B.A. in drama. “I’m the first artist in my family…. And I want to engage with an audience who might not feel comfortable in traditional theatre spaces.”
Which is why both the personality and the goals of the Found Fest, taking audiences into unexpected, non-theatre ‘theatres’, are so meaningful to them. One of the biggest barriers to theatre as an accessible live art form “is the theatre space itself — the community that’s already embedded there, the conventions, the rules, the regulations. And when you already feel on the outside….”
The “secret space” on 97th Street, “beautiful and so freakin’ bizarre!”, is perfect for SKNHEAD, they think. “When you go into a space, and no one knows what’s going on, where the bathrooms are next door …” it’s a great equalizer, they laugh. And all tickets at Common Ground are pay-what-you-will. “Even $20 can be a lot to some people. And the option to pay nothing removes a barrier for an audience I want to reach!”
SKNHEAD by Shyanne Duquette, Found Festival 2026. Photo by Sable Boltz
The fulsome workshop production of Duquette’s new play has attracted contributions from major Canadian theatre stars: it’s directed by the multi-award-winning Ntlaka’pamux playwright/actor Tara Beagan and designed by the great Andy Moro. The dramaturg is actor/playwright Geoffrey Simon Brown of Calgary’s Major Matt Mason (and an early Found Fest instigator).
Duquette’s burgeoning theatre career, which began with improv in school and a drama degree from the U of A, was jump-started when they were Beagan’s assistant director on The Herd, by the Indigenous playwright Kenneth T. Williams, at the Citadel in 2022. A last-minute production emergency meant Duquette suddenly found themself in the cast, acting, and onstage.
Acting, which they still do “here and there,” is not their priority, though. “Producer, director, playwright” are a better fit, they think. “You just get a little bit more say, on the macro level, you know? In the last few years I’ve been so focussed on ‘ethical performance creation’ — how we can hard-hitting stories in ways that protect not only the audience but the actors and creatives as well.”
Theirs is a creative schedule that has escalated in the last few months, with more to come. “When it’s feast or famine you gotta feast when you can, right?” they say cheerfully. In June Duquette was in Toronto, part of Why Not Theatre’s program for emerging BIPOC producers, working on a short Tara Beagan play. In November they’re back in Toronto, at Native Earth, the country’s leading Indigenous company, at work on their new play Fawn.
And meanwhile, in this “the summer of Tara,” they’re ensconced in an un-theatre space at Found Fest, asking themself questions that are central to their artistic practice, and trying to find a balance. “What do I want to tell my community with this script? What do I want to tell an entirely difference audience subset?”
“I wanted to challenge the preconceptions of the theatre audience about the boys who develop into misguided men — by showcasing their humanity. I wanted to inspire reflection on the circumstances that shape them, and investigate how we as a society can better support youths that can find themselves in harm’s way.”
PREVIEW
Found Festival 2026
SKNHEAD
Theatre: Common Ground Arts
Written by: Shyanne Duquette
Directed by: Tara Beagan
Starring: Moses Kouyate, Pax Anderson, Aidan Laudersmith, Emily Berard, Tom Tunski, Sheldon Stockdale
Where: secret location on 97 St. between Jasper Ave. and 102 A Ave.
Running: Thursday through Sunday
Tickets: pay-what-you-will, commongroundarts.ca.
